


if i could i would take back the things i do

by scenedenial



Category: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Boys In Love, Canon Divergent, Cheating, Kissing, M/M, Nsfw content, Reunion Sex, Talking, Theo Decker POV, adult theo and boris, boris is basically a pillow princess but who’s surprised, depressed theodore, post NY reunion, slightly out of character because it’s far too romantic and not repressed enough at all oop, spill your guts then fuck your long lost best friend: theodore decker edition, substance use, theo is a gentle top, they have sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-20
Updated: 2019-06-20
Packaged: 2020-05-15 06:27:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19290088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scenedenial/pseuds/scenedenial
Summary: He is sitting on my bed, the one that used to be Welty’s, looking oddly small and young amid the tangle of cigarette-scented sheets. His black coat still hangs off his thin shoulders, and his heavy, European-looking work boots tap in time against the scuffed wood floor. It makes my chest ache indistinctly. I want him to take them off, to lay down here with his bare feet and torn skate shirt, go right back into talking shit and rolling blunts as if we were 16 in Vegas again.





	if i could i would take back the things i do

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic of this pairing, but this has been my favorite book for like ? 3 years now ? and this is long overdue :’) I hope you guys enjoy!!

I have been under a kind of self-inflicted duress that shows itself to me in ugly increments—late at night, sweating, stomach roiling and head pounding with the anxious need for a pill; losing my train of thought all at once while standing in the store, right in the middle of selling some poor, rich sap a dresser or armchair for an inflated price; sitting straight up in bed with dawn light coming through the windows, heart pounding in my throat, the smell of death and rot in my nose. 

So when Boris arrives—Boris, who knows me better than even Hobie, despite the ten-odd years we’ve spent on opposite sides of the globe—he notices it almost instantly.

“Potter,” he says, that affected Ukrainian heaviness in his voice practically unchanged from our childhoods (deeper, maybe, but same warm and lilted intonation), “what is it, now?”

He is sitting on my bed, the one that used to be Welty’s, looking oddly small and young amid the tangle of cigarette-scented sheets. His black coat still hangs off his thin shoulders, and his heavy, European-looking work boots tap in time against the scuffed wood floor. It makes my chest ache indistinctly. I want him to take them off, to lay down here with his bare feet and torn skate shirt, go right back into talking shit and rolling blunts as if we were 16 in Vegas again. 

All the time, I think about going back. All the time, I think it might have been better if we’d never left. Even if we were living on the streets with meth habits and not enough cash between us for a six pack. Even then, it could have been better. 

I shrug my shoulders, realizing he‘s still waiting for an answer. He shakes his head with a half-smile playing on his dry lips (some things don’t change), an expression I know well: _you think you’re getting away with that?_

“It’s all...” I start, sitting heavy on the bed next to him. Our shoulders press together, so familiar that I could weep. “It’s all wrong.”

I hadn’t spoken this candidly to anybody since I left Boris back in that desert. Not Hobie, not Pippa, not Mrs. Barbour or Kitsey. I realize with a start that he doesn’t yet know about Kitsey, not yet. As if that had all felt too insignificant to even mention while we were sitting in a dim corner booth of the emptying bar.

“Well, tell me.” Boris says, matter-of-fact, eyes slanted down as he roots in an oversized pocket of his jacket and comes up with a pack of Lucky Strikes and a lighter. I think about telling him not to smoke in here, but what does it matter? “Tell me why it’s all wrong.”

His hair is shorter but just as untamed. His eyes have not lost their spark and quick-jump lightning, though they are lined just slightly at the corners. The way he crooks his head to one side and taps his fingers absentmindedly to ash his cigarette into the empty water glass on my bedside table sends me reeling back in time to those two, sunburnt, bleached out years under the desert sky with him. 

I tell him. I tell him about Kitsey and the pills I’ve been popping for the last eight years. I tell him about my headaches and tinnitus and insomnia. I tell him about how I’ve been to five different shrinks and none of them have given me antidepressants that work. I tell him about the dreams. About the intolerable dinner parties with intolerable people that feel like slow, horrible torture. I tell him about how bad I’ve fucked up, selling the fake pieces of furniture off from Hobie’s workshop like they’re originals.

I don’t tell him about the painting, though I badly, badly want to. 

“Shit.” He says when I’ve talked myself into a burnt-out stupor. He states it in such a bland, grave way that it strikes me as infinitely, uproariously funny, and I double over in laughter. 

His laughter joins mine a moment later, starting as an incredulous question and morphing into a full-belly cackle that reminds me of when we were kids, wandering to school high and hungry. In those days, one of us barely had to glance at the other to set us both off into peals and streams of hysteria that were practically unstoppable. 

“Ah,” Boris mutters, wiping at his eyes when we both manage to straighten up again, “Potter. You are a shit storm.”

I nod, so impossibly glad to have him here, telling it like it is, waving his thin white hand around in the air between us. I can’t recall the last time I laughed like that, and maybe I haven’t since I left Vegas all those years ago. 

“I am.”

“You are not sleeping, ah?” He leans forward, takes my chin in a cold, bony hand. I let him tilt my face towards him, examine my eyes. I feel warm and embarrassed but unwilling to pull away from his touch; it instills in me a sleepy, hazy ghost memory, endless entwining of past and present. 

“Not really, actually.” I say with him still staring me down hard. Boris clucks, shakes his dark head. 

“Not good.” He lets my chin go and I feel the leftover heat of it glowing against my skin. “Can’t you break it off with this _Kitsey_?” He says her name like it tastes bitter.

“Fuck. No.” I push my glasses up off my nose to rub at my eyes. I’m tired, suddenly, tired and wanting a drink even as the vodka we downed still sits hot in my belly. 

“But you aren’t happy.”

“Are you happy with your wife?” I retort, perhaps too sharply. To his credit, Boris’s pleasant, neutral expression doesn’t change.

“Is different.” He says waving a hand in front of my face, and I feel a spark of the old infuriation that would rise up in my throat whenever I couldn’t get him to understand something or to budge. He’s too stubborn. Always been too stubborn.

“How?”

“We’re European. She got pregnant. You know.” He spreads his palms out, face-up, a gesture of ours meaning _get it?_ My throat tightens up with the realization of how quickly we’ve fallen back into our old language of glances and hands. I missed him. I miss him. 

“Boris...” I sigh, running a hand through my hair. “It’s not like that. I can’t.”

He huffs, shrugs one shoulder. 

“Let’s not talk about it.” I say, almost desperately. I just want to hear how he is. I just want to look at him and not think about Kitsey or the painting or anything else in my vapid, grey-edged life.

He looks at me, head cocked, and I think he’s going to push it. He doesn’t.

“Alright.”

“You can take your coat off.” I say half-under my breath, sounding like a housewife in an impassionate affair. He smiles at me, eyes cheery and dark.

“Alright.” He repeats. “Sure, Potter.” 

I sit on my bed in the low light and watch him wrestle off his overcoat and toss it over the back of my desk chair. He slips off his boots, kicks them to the side. My breathing is fast and shallow for no good reason. I scoot back on the bed so my back is flush against the wall. 

“You know,” Boris says, voice a teasing lilt as he turns back to me, “could take me to dinner first.” 

The blood in my body rises to my face. He’s standing there, looking thinner and shorter without his coat and shoes, the warm light of my desk lamp glowing out behind him in a halo. I drop my chin towards my chest. 

“Boris.” My heart goes _bum-bum-bum_ in my throat and ears. 

“Theodore.” He murmurs, carefully, weightily. The bottom of my stomach drops out. _Theodore._

“You’re married.” I say faintly. He steps forward.

“And you are engaged.” His voice is dark and soft and direct. I stare at him, trying to work out if he’s serious; surely, he can’t be; surely, he is.

“I haven’t seen you for ten years.” I don’t know why I’m fighting it when all I want to do is grab him by the thin, blue-veined wrists and pull him, rough and 16-year-old-tumble, on top of me.

“All the more reason.” Boris says, convincingly. I come to the realization that I would still do anything he asked of me, would still melt into softness under his lightest touch. 

I look at him, chewing at my bottom lip. The vodka has made me feel hazy and slightly dissociative. He is lovely and pale, bones bird-delicate. 

“Okay.” I say, meaning, _please_.

“Okay?”

“Yes.”

When he puts his hands on me it is such a nervous, deja-vu shock that my whole body is wracked with a shiver. It’s a familiar, sweet, muscle-memory ache when his hands press flat to my shoulders and he leans in close, close enough that I can smell his liquored, herring-sharp breath. 

“Has been a while.” Boris breathes. I nod, not trusting myself to speak. “I have thought about this, you know.”

“Me too.” I say before I realize that I will. There is a smudge on the left lens of my glasses, making part of Boris’s milk-white face blur just slightly, like an underdeveloped Polaroid. My skin is burning and buzzing.

He puts a palm to my face. 

I close my hand over his, feeling his pulse jump in his wrist, and he kisses me. 

My lips are hanging slightly open when he catches them in his own, and my front teeth hook minutely in his dry bottom lip. He pulls away from me, no more than an inch, and smiles. He looks softer around the edges than I have ever seen him.

I swear, pull back to take off my glasses and rub at my eyes. 

“Sorry, shit, I’m...drunk.” I’m embarrassed, stumbling over my words in a way I don’t remember doing even as a fifteen year old virgin. Though, to be fair, that version of me was well past _drunk_ every time this happened. That version of me had lived long enough with Boris’s puke-sounds and underwear-sharing-habits to lose every bit of shyness I might have once had around him.

That shyness has come back, now, here in a bedroom that he has never dressed or vomited or cried in. But he is here now. Smiling.

“Oh, Potter.” His hand, comfortingly cool, rests against the spot between my neck and shoulder blade. “Don’t worry.”

He leans in and presses his lips to the thin skin just beneath my eye, so jarringly gentle that I feel a lump rise in my throat. 

_Boris, Boris, Boris._ He’s here, again. I have him to myself, again.

This time the kiss deepens. I’m only dimly aware that my back is sliding down the bedroom wall until I’m nearly laying down, only dimly aware that he has crawled up over me, knee between my legs, hands planted beside my shoulders so I have to crane up to catch his mouth in mine. 

I had not been considering this possibility until he came back to my bedroom, and even then it had only been with the faint surprise of a memory coming back. The ghost of what we used to do on nights like these pressing up against my sternum. And now, here we are. 

My neck is cramping up from the half-raised position I’m holding myself in, so I get a hand between us and push him back gently by the chest. 

“Something is wrong?” His brow is furrowed with a kind of worry that strikes me as sweeter than anything I’ve felt in years and years. I shake my head, smile probably too wide for teeth still fucked up from from the eating habits we had as teenagers, and take him by the wrist to shuffle us both around so that we’re lengthwise on the messy double bed.

It goes and goes. I can’t tell who it is that begins unbuttoning silky, inconvenient work shirts first, but when I get up to check the lock on the door (oh, to need to do such a thing sends shivers down my spine), they are both discarded on the floor. 

When I turn back around, half dressed and half blind with my hair a mess, the image of Boris spread out on my bed like some kind of slinky house cat makes my breath catch hard. His chest is thin and pale, and I note a bruise underneath his right-side rib cage. I must make some sort of sound because he looks at me with an affectionate, quizzical expression on his face. 

“Come back to bed.” He says after we’ve stared at each other wordlessly for a moment. And, god, to hear him say that makes the backs of my eyes go hot. Hangs in the air in the way that his comforting whispers when I woke up shaking from nightmares would; _is only me, I am here, shh, shh, Potter, is okay, it will be okay_. I come back to bed.

We slip under the sheets, belts and trousers gone, knees knocking together in the sweaty warmth of a bed holding two. 

It is different than it was in Vegas, different but the same too in many unnerving ways. To be in bed with him. To smell his hair and comforting, liquor-y sweat. To have his skin brushing over mine in small ways that say _you aren’t alone_.

Different because it’s slow, because his eyes are on me, because we aren’t as fucked up as we could be. Different because I trace a line from his wrist to his collarbone with my pointer finger. Different, different because he says, very quietly, “I can take my underwear off if you like.” 

I nod. He does. I move his hand to the waistband of my own briefs and let him tug them down. It takes a bit of shuffling, sharp shoulders knocking against ribs, Boris laughing in a nervous huff when he comes up with my briefs and tosses them to the floor. 

To be here, naked, with him. My face must be tomato-red in the low light. I think of Kitsey for an ever-so-brief moment and then push the thought away. She isn’t here; it is just him and I and heavy breaths with barely any space between our bodies.

“Ah, Potter.” He sighs into my bare, sweat-dampened shoulder. (I can feel him, half-hard at my thigh, but ignore it as best I can in a futile attempt to keep my wits about me.) “Has been too long.” His lips, nose, nudge at the skin beneath my earlobe and behind my jawline. 

“I know.” I say, nervous and rubber-band-taut but ready to soften all the way out under his hands. “ _Borya_ , I know.”

He pulls away slightly, looking at me with a smile playing on his lips. “Borya? Where did you get that?”

I flush, roll my eyes, get a hand on the back of his neck so he can’t keep looking at me in that teasing, innocuous way. 

“Theo,” he says, the low glow of my desk lamp glinting off the bloodshot whites of his eyes, “you have, you know?” He say something quiet in Ukrainian, gestures with his thumb towards my nightstand, and I get it. 

I scramble up, stretching across his body to fumble in the drawer beside my bed. His cold, thin-bones hand splays across my shoulder blade. A moment later, I come up triumphant, a condom and a bottle of lube tight in my fist. Boris _tsks_ , half-laughing at me. 

“So prepared.”

I think for a second about making some sharp retort about how he isn’t the only person I’ve slept with in all these years, but, really, it’s a moot point. Because here and now it feels as if he’s the only one. The only one that’s mattered, anyways. 

“Do you want to—“ I’m nervous, my words cracked and shaky, and he cuts me off by grabbing the lube from my hand with a flashing, devilish grin and a shake of his curls. 

“Potter? Shut up.”

He kicks the bedclothes back into a twisted pile at the foot of the bed, and I go lightheaded and woozy while kneeling in them, watching him spread his thin white thighs and slide his equally thin, equally white fingers between them. 

My breath, fast and uncontrolled, comes out through my nose in a thin whistle. His eyes meet mine. He jerks his chin up and I understand.

I crawl up over the bed, hard and trying not to be embarrassed about it, and tuck myself in between his open legs to kiss him hasty and hot on the mouth. His tongue slips over mine, over my bottom lip. I can feel his arm moving between us. The sounds he is making are bitten off and frustrated, and when I sit back, I can see that the corners of his eyes are glinting with tears. 

“Let me—can I help you?” 

“Please.” His voice is husky and dark, head dropping back against the pillows as his fingers slide out with a sick, delicious sound. The lube drops from his trembling hand into my trembling hand, and I smear it across my fingers before I can psych myself out about it. Boris. It’s Boris. I place my palm flat on his lower stomach, relish in the way he hisses and arches his back minutely at the touch, and work my index finger inside. 

The feeling blasts me back, one that I have not come close to mirroring since the hot desert winds of Vegas were rattling the windowpanes as Boris shook and tensed on the sweat-sticky mattress. It is not like this with Kitsey; he is hotter and tighter, a vice around me, and his face is screwed up in such a lovely, overwhelming manner that my throat feels scratchy. Hell, it is not like this with me; the angle here is better, the fact that it is _him_. 

I add one finger, then another, in quick succession.

“ _Fuck_.” He mutters sharply, voice more darkly accented as his grip on reality begins to falter in my musty, dim bedroom. 

“Is that good?” I say under my breath, hating the way that it sounds like a cheap porn quote, loving the way that mouth drops open, eyes closed tight, as he nods rapidly. 

“Listen,” he sighs, voice so low that I have to lean down towards him to hear it, “please get on with it.”

Some perverted, primitive piece of my brain has gripped onto the idea that I want to hear him say it. I want to listen to him moan and beg and fall apart beneath me. 

“Get on with what?” I ask, feigning innocence, crooking my fingers inside of him. His legs spasm.

“Fuck off.”

“No, c’mon, tell me. Tell me what you want and I’ll do it.”

“Fine! _Fine_.” He groans it, chided on by a particularly rough hickey bitten into the top of his chest. “I want you to fuck me.”

It’s enough for me. I pull my fingers out, careful not to hurt him, and wipe them indulgently on his bare thighs. He gasps but doesn’t say a thing. I roll the condom on, hands trembling so hard that it takes a nearly-superhuman amount of focus, and apply the lube liberally. The feeling of it makes the muscles in my neck and pelvis tighten and jump. _God._

We do not waste time. He pulls my neck down to kiss me, hard and rough, then shoves a hand between us and guides my cock, which is so swollen at this point that it aches insistently, up against his hole. The resistance that I meet while pushing in, slowly slowly, is less than I expected, and I end up on top of him, arms framing his lovely, sweating moon face, panting hard. 

“Ah!” He groans loud. I thank everything above me that Hobie is out for the night with Mrs. DeFrees. Boris’s face is pulled into a strained, beautiful amalgamation of pleasure and pain. “Ah, fuck, Theo. Come _on_.” 

It feels so good that I can barely think, can do little more than drop my head into the space between his ear and shoulder and let him cradle it as we rock in tandem. His cool legs have come up and wrapped around my lower back, changing the angle just enough that he keens loud and high into my ear every time I bottom out. _Christ_. Gorgeous. 

I realize that there’s no chance of it lasting when he begins nibbling at my ear, scraping along my back with too-long nails. I scoot up onto my knees, dragging his hips up with me in a complex, not entirely smooth motion that makes him bust out into breathless giggles until I drive back down into him as hard as I ever have. 

“Jesus fucking Christ.” He sighs, followed by a harsh string of curses in Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish. “That, right there. Again.”

I oblige, pounding hard, letting go entirely for the first time tonight. He curses and wails and digs his sharp canines into my shoulders, but doesn’t say a word in protest. 

I come almost before I recognize that it’s happening—something about the heady, weed-and-vodka laced smell of him, along with his familiar, dirty hair and ghost-pale skin brought it upon me without warning. I shout as it happens, clutching at Boris as he clenches and clenches underneath me, saying something I cannot understand through the haze of it all. 

When I recover enough to see straight, I pull out of him and go down between his legs without taking the time to contemplate it. He comes in my mouth within thirty seconds, and I swallow what I can, eyes streaming and spunk dripping down my chin. He drags me up towards him and licks it off me. We kiss, and the only thing I can taste is _Boris Boris Boris_.

“Potter! Fuck!” He exclaims as I roll off him and collapse, panting, next to him on the torn-apart bed. “You learned some tricks!” He laughs, slaps me on the chest with a sticky hand. “That was _great_.” 

“You weren’t so bad yourself.” I tell him, rolling to my side so I can look at his face. He is pink-faced and wild-eyed. 

“I have missed you.”

“Same here.” I am too far gone and sex-sedated to be embarrassed at the admission. “So much, Boris.” I put a palm on the side of his face and pull him in towards me. He bites at my lower lip. 

“Well.” He murmurs, swinging a bare leg across my own. “Guess we must make up for lost time, then, ah?”


End file.
